Grumpa Joe's Place

Today, turned into something remarkable. I was rolling around in bed trying to find a spot where my hip wouldn’t hurt when Lovely appeared and shook me awake. “Don’t you remember that you promised to take me for my blood test this morning at nine?”

“Okay, okay,” I answered, “I thought you were only kidding.” I rolled over my aching hip and out of bed. We were on our way at 9:06 a.m. Before we left, however, she weaseled me into taking her to the last Farmer’s Market of the year in LaGrange, IL. One of her girlfriends has been bragging about this market all summer long, and she reasoned, since we are going to Blue Island this morning maybe we could swing by and see what Aldona has been talking about. The hip pain must have affected my brain, because I reluctantly agreed to take her.

The Cook County Health Clinic in Blue Island is about thirty miles closer to home than her doctor’s office in downtown Chicago. We pulled off the interstate and drove to Western Avenue in Blue Island. I turned onto Western and spotted an open parking space, so I took it. Previous experience had taught me that if I saw something within one block of the clinic, I should seize it. If I hadn’t, I would have wound up circling the blocks of narrow crowded side streets for ten minutes looking for an opening.

The sun shone brightly, and it was a balmy fifty degrees without a wisp of wind. We enjoyed the one-block walk to the clinic. A pleasant young lady security guard, all of four-feet-ten tall, guided us to where we needed to go. I wondered if she was carrying a weapon; it might have explained why she looked as wide as she was tall. The lab was in the basement of this three story brick building every floor of which was dedicated to various diseases. The elevator opened to a miraculously empty waiting room. As we sat waiting another elderly couple arrived. A tall black man pushing a short fat black lady in a wheel chair. I noticed how attentive he was to her needs. For some reason which I will not argue with the old couple were called in first. We sat and watched for our turn to come up. The lab door opened and the elderly couple exited but stopped. The old man helped the lady out of the wheelchair and then stood behind her. She stood hunched slightly forward holding a plastic cup and stared at the door in front of her. Her eyes were fixated on the door, but she looked as though any movement of air would have knocked her down into a face plant with the floor. Finally, she stepped to the door and grabbed the door knob. She successfully entered the rest room to donate her urine for testing.

Lovely got called next, and as I waited, the old man wheeled over, parked the wheelchair, and sat next to me. I noticed he wore a sweatshirt monogrammed with “SJC Basketball.” I leaned over and asked him if his shirt referred to Saint Joseph’s College. He looked at me, stunned. “Yes, it does?”

“What year were you there?”

He laughed and said, “No, I didn’t attend; my daughter did. She graduated in 2017.” I explained that the reason I asked is that I attended school there in 1956-57. In the next ten minutes, we became fast friends as we shared some tales about the school. His daughter was on the SJC basketball team all four years she attended. He told me he drove the hundred miles to watch every home game while she was at school. Her graduating class of 2017 was the last year the school existed.

We discussed how schools have changed over the years. “There was a time when men were restricted to the lobby of a women’s dorm, then when my youngest daughter attended the University of Illinois, men and women shared rooms on the same floors.” I told him that when I started at Saint Joe’s, it was a coed school. There were 780 men and one girl. Finally, the restroom door popped open, and the little lady shuffled out, looking like she would fall on her face the whole time. That’s when he told me that she was his older sister and that she was ninety-seven years old, he was eighty-eight. That is when I went into shock. He was a year older than me but much more spry and younger looking.

We arrived at 53 LaGrange Road at 11:00 a.m. The farmer’s market circles the city hall. The street-level municipal parking lot was jammed, and I was forced to use the three-story garage. I finally squeezed into a space at the 2.5 level. The market was well-attended, and many vendors were still selling. Most of the stalls hawked food, honey, soap, and doughnuts, but there was one farmer with fresh vegetables. Lovely and I split up because I had to take a call from my son-in-law. He reported that my daughter’s conditioned worsened from yesterday on her birthday when we visited and he was forced to up her morphine to give her relief. She has been fighting brain cancer for ten years and has run out of treatment options, and is now in hospice care.

Just like that, my beautiful sunny day darkened.

Filed under: Aging, Biography | Tagged: Cancer, Cook County Health, farmer's market, Saint Joseph's College |